Embracing the Witch and the Goddess

Feminist Ritual-Makers in New Zealand

Kathryn Rountree

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134411566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Embracing the Witch and the Goddess is a detailed survey of present-day feminist witches in New Zealand. It examines the attraction of witchcraft for its practitioners, and explores witches' rituals, views and beliefs about how magic works. The book provides a detailed portrait of an undocumented section of the growing neo-pagan movement, and compares the special character of New Zealand witchcraft with its counterparts in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia.
Kathryn Rountree traces the emergence and history of feminist witchcraft, and links witchcraft with the contemporary Goddess movement. She reviews scholarly approaches on the study of witchcraft and deals with the key debates which have engaged the movement's adherents and their critics, and ultimately presents what Mary Daly declared was missing from most historical and anthropological research on witchcraft: a 'Hag-identified vision'.
Based on fieldwork amongst witch practitioners, Embracing the Witch and the Goddess is an important contribution to the emerging profile of present-day witchcraft and paganism.

1
INTRODUCTION

I always associated the witch with magic. I was always very curious about how the gingerbread castle got there. What skill, expertise, or mastery did she have to work things like that? I read The Lord of the Rings quite young, and I really identified with the Elven women there. That was my image of ‘witch’ – woman of power, prestige and magic.

(Galadriel)¹

You say ‘witch’ and there’s an image that comes to mind. Until that image is dispelled, it’s going to be a constant dilemma for women. Identifying as ‘witch’, I feel more fulfilled in this time of my life than I have in any other.

(Sybil)

We must learn to dis-spell the language of phallocracy which keeps us under the spell of brokenness. This spell splits our perceptions of our Selves and of the cosmos, overtly and subliminally.

(Daly 1979: 4)

I met my first witch at the age of three in a children’s fairy story. She was a warty, black-clad old hag who lived alone in the depths of a forest, snared and dined on juicy children, and turned those who displeased her into toads. She presented an image of menace, cunning, pure evil. My story books were full of mothers who turned out to be step-mothers who made children’s lives hell, grandmothers who were wolves in disguise, and godmothers who cursed the infant in rage when not invited to the party.² Witches could seem attractive and enticing in these stories, but would turn out to be cannibals.

What the story books did not tell, but what the European witch-hunters of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries claimed, was that this wicked witch also had sexual intercourse with the Devil, suckled demons and her familiars, stole and ate penises as well as babies, and participated in orgies with fellow witches. The image of ‘witch’ incorporated both the hideous hag and the irresistible seductress.

I met my first goddess at primary school during a study of Greek mythology. She glows in the memory as an image of marvellous beauty and power. She had long golden hair and wore flowing white robes; she combined sexual desirability with moral goodness, superhuman strength with supernatural power. As an image, she represented the polar opposite of the wicked witch.

But both images – the witch and the goddess – produced a kind of awe. Both were female, but they existed outside the range of images acceptable or even imaginable for ‘normal’ women – the goddess so far above ordinary women that she inhabited the realm of the supernatural, the witch a terrifying inhabitant of the margins of the social world. Both were images of independent female power which was designated off-limits for ‘normal’ women. In any case, neither witches nor goddesses were ‘real’.

After the scary fairy stories and childhood romance with Greek myths, I had nothing to do with witches or goddesses until I went to university. There I learnt about the victims of the European and Salem witch-hunts and about witchcraft in distant, exotic places – mostly in Africa. Whereas the evil-doing hag of childhood stories had evoked fear and later ridicule, these scholarly accounts of witches engendered pity or disbelief. Nonetheless, as an anthropology student, I was fascinated with other peoples’ belief systems, especially their religious beliefs however bizarre or irrational they might seem, and how they governed peoples’ lives.

Years later, after I had returned to university and was casting about for a topic for doctoral research – something that would remain fascinating for at least three years – I was listening to a lecture on cross-cultural ideas about illness and wellness, medicine and magic, when the idea of studying witches suddenly came to me. I knew witchcraft was quite an orthodox topic for anthropological study, but to my knowledge Western anthropologists’ research on the topic had always been conducted in ‘other cultures’, rather than in their own. I wanted to study witches ‘at home’ in New Zealand, despite the fact that I knew no witches personally and had no idea how I might come to meet some. I had heard vaguely about people who met in graveyards at midnight to perform unsavoury rites, but was inclined to doubt the truth of such stories. I imagined it would be difficult to find witches, and more difficult, not to mention dangerous, to gain their permission to study them. I had never heard of ‘feminist witchcraft’ or ‘Goddess spirituality’.

When I excitedly told people what I hoped to study, most responded with smirks, serious doubt about whether the topic was substantial or serious enough for doctoral research, or genuine alarm about what might become of me. Witchcraft, it seemed, was a legitimate topic for study only so long as it was witchcraft in an ‘other culture’. One woman, however, a student in one of my anthropology tutorials, responded by cheerfully telling me that she was a witch herself, and that I should read Starhawk, an American writer, if I wanted to find out more about contemporary witchcraft. I borrowed Starhawk’s first book, The Spiral Dance, from the university library and read it in an evening.

Another friend passed on a newspaper clipping she had saved about a local woman artist which described her as a ‘modern day witch’. In the clipping I learnt that a number of women’s ritual groups met in Auckland and that the artist, Juliet Batten, had written a book called Power from Within: A Feminist Guide to Ritual-making. From this book I learnt that the author taught courses on ritual through the University of Auckland’s Department of Continuing Education. (I later discovered that Juliet called herself a ritual-maker rather than a witch, as the newspaper had described her.) I checked out the university’s publicity brochure and found two courses offered: a weekend workshop taught by Juliet and a second – due to start in a few days time – called ‘Rites of Passage for Women’ led by another facilitator. There was one place left on this course so I enrolled and, with some trepidation, took the course. Two weeks later I attended the first of many workshops on ritual with Juliet Batten. That was 13 years ago.

Most of the women I met in those early workshops, and hundreds like them I have met in the years since, are involved in a movement known in New Zealand both as ‘feminist witchcraft’ and as ‘Goddess spirituality’. At first I baulked at the idea that these two names referred to a single phenomenon. I was used to thinking of the hideous hag and the divinely beautiful goddess as polarized images. But the women I met were re-examining the witch and the goddess as images of womanhood and deconstructing their stereotypical meanings. They claimed that far from being opposites, the witch and the goddess were one. Moreover, they claimed that ‘ordinary women’, like themselves, could legitimately self-identify both as ‘witch’ and as ‘goddess’.

Most of my early research focused on trying to understand how and why these women should want to do so. Why would any feminist, with the knowledge that many thousands of women had been victims of the European witch-hunts, embrace a label which epitomized the misogyny of patriarchal cultures, not to mention the terrors of childhood? Wasn’t it presumptuous, even heretical, or at least unnecessary, to call oneself a ‘goddess’?

In the course of the research I came to see the women’s self-identification as ‘witch’ and ‘goddess’ as having dramatic symbolic value. In their view, the reason for the traditional designation of the witch and the goddess as illegitimate models of ‘normal’ womanhood is that both constitute images of female power which lies outside male control: hence their appeal to this group of feminists (but not to all feminists, as we shall see in chapter four). By selfidentifying as ‘witch’ and as ‘goddess’ the women I studied symbolically lay claim to the independent female power which the two symbols represent: they image themselves as strong and autonomous, as having the right to choose and direct their own lives. Identifying in these ways is a symbolic act of selfempowerment by which these women permit themselves to connect with and legitimate both the sacred, strong and the dark, dangerous aspects of themselves. They are attempting to re-member themselves, to reclaim aspects of themselves to which they believe they have been denied access. By remembering the witch and the Goddess and assigning them with new meanings and values, women are re-membering and re-valuing themselves.³

By employing the symbol of ‘goddess’, they are recalling a time when, they believe, Europe was peopled by societies whose religions centred on female divinities, especially various versions of a ‘Great Mother’ Goddess who was responsible for the fertility of crops, animals and human communities. This period of ‘pre-patriarchal religion’, the evidence for which they say stretches from 30,000 to around 4,000 years ago, is claimed to correspond with a period of pre-patriarchal social relations when women were valued as highly as men and both sexes participated fully in society. Modern followers of Goddess spirituality trace a direct connection between the demise of the Goddess and the demise of women’s position in society. The shift to patriarchy and patriarchal religions in Western societies, with the eventual dominance of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, they argue, meant that women were alienated not only from social and political power but also from powerful parts of themselves. Gadon (1990: xiv) writes:

When the balance changed, the dark side of the feminine was also suppressed. The Goddess had been a model of women’s nature in all its fullness. The irrational, the chaotic and the destructive, which had been acknowledged when the Goddess reigned supreme, were split off from divinity and became feared. Women could no longer express their complete psychic reality.

It was this ‘dark side of the feminine’ which, they claim, was distorted and eventually came to be imaged as the witch (Walker 1985). I discuss the historical development of the witch stereotype in more detail in chapter two.

While many women in the Goddess spirituality movement see the early goddess-worshipping societies of Europe in a utopian light with respect to gender relations, they do not yearn to turn back the clock several millennia, advocate de-evolutionary cultural change, or idealize everything about ancient societies. They would not, for instance, wish to embrace Stone-age technology, carry out animal sacrifices, or endure high infant-mortality rates; nor do they imagine that goddess-worshipping societies were free of injustice or cruelty. They do believe, however, that the past offers different models for more balanced gender relations and for a more sustainable relationship between humanity and the earth. In recalling the religions of ancient societies they also want to point out that patriarchy and god-worship are not normative and that ‘goddess’ can be a useful symbol for women today (the best known article on this topic is Christ 1982, originally published in 1978 in Heresies 5).

It must be noted, however, that throughout its history (a little over 30 years) the modern Goddess movement has come under fire from many feminist and other scholars in relation to, among other things, what are regarded as romantic, utopian and plain false beliefs and claims about goddesses and ancient societies. The Goddess movement is accused of mythologizing and misrepresenting the past to serve a contemporary socio-political and religious agenda. The debate became extremely heated in the wake of the publication of Cynthia Eller’s book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future (2000). The movement has also been savagely criticized by some feminists for re-invoking unhelpful essentialist ideas about ‘woman as nature’ and nurturer. I discuss these debates in chapter four.

By creating and embracing a spirituality in which the primary image of divinity is a goddess, feminist witches are not only re-conceptualizing the nature of the divine, they are also re-conceptualizing the nature of the feminine. They reject the image of the feminine as inferior, weak and passive as an oppressive legacy of Christianity.⁴ The symbol of ‘goddess’, on the other hand, is seen as opening up a great range of images of the feminine: virginal maiden, enchanting seductress, nurturing mother, warrior, protector, creator, death-dealing crone, and so on. The Goddess, feminist witches say, has a thousand faces.

Collapsing the witch/goddess dichotomy is one aspect of a much broader challenge these women are making to the worldview which has long been dominant in Western societies, one founded on dualism in which women come off worse than men, Blacks come off worse than Whites, the body is subordinate to and in conflict with the spirit, and the natural world’s value is measured in terms of exploitable resources. Instead they prefer a holistic worldview which emphasizes connection, balance and cyclic processes. This alternative worldview is explored in detail in the following chapters.

Of course feminist witches are not the only ones who have been challenging the dominant worldview in Western societies. In the past three to four decades, feminists more generally have been challenging the hegemony of Western patriarchy, the hegemony of Western colonialism has taken a further battering, the civil rights, gay rights, environmental and peace movements have become increasingly vociferous, active and effective. The call for a more holistic worldview is coming from many diverse quarters: eco-feminism, psychotherapy, alternative healing, the New Age, self-help and ‘human potential’ movements, scientific theories such as James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’, and so on. Feminist witches see themselves as part of this larger amorphous ‘mood’ or ‘movement’ abroad in contemporary societies which is challenging the ‘dominator model’⁵ which has framed social relations with regard to gender, ethnicity, age, class and other social distinctions, as well as human relationships with the rest of the natural world.

While feminist witchcraft is broadly connected with the diverse movements listed above, its closest relationships are with two umbrella movements whose own constituencies are large and diverse. Feminist witches form a subgroup both within feminism and within modern Paganism. The latter is known also as ‘neo-Paganism’, a name which draws attention to the fact that this is a newly created religious movement (although some Pagan traditions, like Druidry, extend back to the late eighteenth century). Paganism, which the ‘Introduction’ to Paganism Today says is ‘fast developing as the new religion of the twenty-first century’, incorporates Wicca, Goddess spirituality, Druidry, Shamanism, Heathenism, Sacred Ecology and a number of other traditions (Hardman 1995: ix). Griffin (2000b: 14) quotes sources which estimate that there are up to 500,000 in the American Goddess community and between 110,000 and 120,000 in the United Kingdom.⁶ While numbers of Pagans are greatest in the US and UK, there are also Pagan communities in continental Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, South Africa and Japan. Many branches of Paganism are also active in Australia (see Hume 1997).

Essentially Paganism today consists of a group of modern Earth religions whose first principle is love for and kinship with nature, and reverence for the life force and its continuous cycles of life and death (Hardman 1995: xi).⁷ ‘Paganism is a religion at home on Earth’; for Pagans ‘every day is sacred and all the Earth is holy’ (Harvey 1997: vii, 1). The word ‘pagan’ comes from the Latin paganus meaning ‘country dweller’, and of course it came to be associated with those who followed older religions which Christianity sought to replace. While there is no codified set of beliefs and practices, most Pagans acknowledge the concepts of Goddess and God (and often many gods and goddesses) and follow the ethic: ‘Do what thou wilt, but harm none’, which stresses individual freedom alongside responsible concern for all other beings and for the planet. Most Pagans celebrate a series of eight seasonal festivals (two Solstices, two Equinoxes and four others) within an annual cycle called ‘The Wheel of the Year’. These are discussed in chapter nine. There is now a substantial and growing literature on various forms of Paganism, a small proportion of which is academic, almost all of it referring to the United Kingdom and the United States.⁸ An excellent introduction to Paganism, covering a range of traditions, is Graham Harvey’s Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism (1997).

Under the ‘Pagan’ umbrella, witches are probably the most numerous group.⁹ Although most witches assert that their Craft stretches back millennia before ‘The Burning Times’ of the European witch-hunts, most scholars credit Gerald Gardner, a British civil servant, with being the originator of the specific practices of modern witchcraft, or ‘Wicca’ as it is known.¹⁰ In 1954, three years after the Witchcraft Act was repealed in Britain, Gardner published Witchcraft Today wherein he set out the beliefs and ritual practices of witchcraft which, many have since argued, he largely invented, or at least creatively assembled from a variety of sources, himself. Gardner claimed to have discovered an ancient coven in the area of the New Forest into which he was initiated in 1939 by one of its members, Dorothy Clutterbuck. Scholars and Pagans alike have long debated the truthfulness of Gardner’s story.¹¹

While Gardner’s name is the one associated with the founding of modern witchcraft, its origins can be traced to various philosophies and experimental groups active in the nineteenth century, the most relevant of which was the magical group called the Order of the Golden Dawn, formed in 1887 by three dissident Freemasons, which in turn spawned the Society of the Inner Light in 1922. But the important ideas and rituals of modern witchcraft have much older heritages within the Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance, neo-Platonism, old European folk-beliefs, magical practices and seasonal festivals, various polytheistic mythologies (for example, Greek, Egyptian, Celtic and Near Eastern), pre-Christian ‘pagan’ religions and European Shamanism.¹²

Just as witches form the most numerous group within Paganism, most literature in the field by both practitioners and academics (a number of authors fall into both categories) is about Wicca. Wicca differs from feminist witchcraft in significant ways: while both share a holistic worldview, revere nature, use the same basic ritual structure and are polytheistic, Wiccan covens are mixed and stress gender polarity and complementarity in the working of magic, and embrace gods as well as goddesses (although the Goddess is thought to be pre-eminent). There are many books introducing Wicca and witchcraft: the first I read (also the first book many witches read), The Spiral Dance by Starhawk, is an excellent introduction. (By 2000 sales had exceeded 300,000.) Feminist witches, on the other hand, usually meet in women-only groups and focus exclusively on the Goddess and a wide range of goddesses from ancient and living religious traditions. Their feminist politics determines a strong emphasis on women’s self-empowerment and healing during rituals. Their beliefs and practices, especially those of New Zealand feminist witches, are explained in detail in the following chapters.

Historically, on the global scene, feminist witches (or ‘Dianic witches’ – after the goddess Diana – as they are sometimes called in the United States) are generally seen as an offshoot of Wicca and as a relatively small component of the neo-Pagan movement generally. However the situation is rather different in New Zealand. Here, until very recently, feminist witches have had a much stronger presence in terms of visibility and numbers than other witchcraft traditions or forms of modern Paganism. Undoubtedly, as was the case in Australia, followers of other witchcraft and Pagan traditions were practising their religion well before feminist witchcraft emerged on the New Zealand scene in the 1980s, but they kept a very low profile and continued to do so into the 1990s. This has changed only in the last few years, helped by the growth and increased public profile of Paganism and New Age spirituality globally, the development of a local ‘critical mass’ of Pagans and witches, and the internet.

In the 2001 New Zealand census 5,862 people, out of a total population of 3.7 million, identified themselves as some variety of Pagan, of which 2,196 said they were Wiccan.¹³ In September 2000 a Federation of New Zealand Pagans was established and in 2002 the first New Zealand Pagan Festival, attended by 160 people, was held (although many festivals focusing on alternative spirituality had previously been held, some attracti...